1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to managing financial transactions of one or more business units and more particularly, to reconciliation and reporting of financial transactions of one or more business units.
2. Related Art
Reconciliation is a financial process of matching debit and credit transactions for one or more accounts of one or more business units. The unmatched transactions may then be researched and cleared. In organizations with one or more business units, the business units may adopt different accounting systems. The accounting systems may differ in, for example, the computer operating systems, software applications, and the like. This makes the reconciliation process for such organizations difficult, as the financial data from different business units needs to be transformed from different data formats. Such conversions, if performed manually, tend to increase the volume of unmatched transactions. Hence, in order to ensure financial control in the business units and to comply with industry standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley, it is important to provide a standardized and controlled environment for the reconciliation process.
Existing reconciliation processes include manual reconciliation of the financial transactions. These manual reconciliation processes are error-prone and cause an increase in the number of unmatched transactions. There exist reconciliation tools, which provide automated reconciliation and reduce the manual effort and intervention required during the reconciliation process. However, the existing reconciliation tools require the data to be uploaded manually for reconciliation. Further, there is a limitation in auto-match logics that may be created. The existing tools do not provide the flexibility in creation of reports on the output of the reconciliation process. Further, the existing tools may not manage all financial transaction categories efficiently, and may not ensure a controlled reconciliation process.